On Chromosomes, Corporations, and Context
An Intimate Conversation with Scientists-in-Quarantine (also known as my roommates) by TSW Director of Advocacy, Avi-Yona Israel
Garth Fisher, Hannah Horton, Andrew Montequin, and Emilie Lozier are all Ph.D. candidates at Northwestern University. Garth is in the Driskill Graduate Program, researching bacterial biofilms (communities of collaborating single-celled organisms) and their development. In his spare time, he likes to make things out of trash, and is my dear partner, sufferer of all my moods, washer of my laundry. We live with Hannah and Andrew; Andrew has advisors in the Molecular Biosciences and Applied Math departments, studying the embryonic development and patterning of vertebrates. Hannah works in the lab of Dr. Sadie Wignall, focusing on the division of female reproductive cells, a process that is essential for properly passing genetic information from mother to child. Emilie, a Ph.D. candidate in Physical Chemistry, works with nonlinear optical spectroscopy (a.k.a. lasers!) to study the structure of solid/liquid interfaces in environmental systems, and loves the three of us enough to play with our pet lizard and share our company for regular dinners. I trust all four of these radiant oracles with my life, and they keep me from drowning in my breakfast cereal. I sat down with them in the hopes that they could tell me the story of science and arm us all with a bit of thoughtful action.
This interview was conducted in April 2020. It has been edited for clarity.
THE SEVENTH WAVE: It thrills me to be sitting down with the three of you. It requires no effort because you live with me, though I have worn pants so as to remain professional. Somehow, I have ended up living with three brilliant scientists that regularly do things that I could not comprehend even with the assistance of a lobotomy. What do you study? Explain it like you’ve explained it to me, but even simpler, because I still don’t know what you do.
EMILIE LOZIER: I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in Chemistry at Northwestern. My group studies surfaces, so anywhere that one material touches another material. For instance, the surface of the ocean — we’ve got water in contact with air, and you might not think there’s a lot going on at the surface of the ocean, but there are a lot of basic chemical questions about water. It’s still a very hot debate in the field whether the surface of the ocean is acidic or basic. You would think we should know that, but we don’t. My particular project involves looking at metal and metal oxide in contact with water. What I do in the lab all day is point lasers at that surface and measure what bounces off.
TSW: Oh that’s awesome! You got me with lasers, you lost me with most of the other stuff. Now, Andrew?
ANDREW MONTEQUIN: I’m a third-year student in molecular biology — the broader field I’m in is developmental biology. Really it’s just the process of how we go from a single-celled embryo, something that has no head, no arms, no legs, doesn’t have a top or a bottom, an inside or an outside — how do we go from something so simple to something as complex as a fully grown organism. Not only something that has all the proper features for life, but has them in the right proportions too. I look at where certain genes are turned on and off during development, and we use frogs for that, so a lot of my day is spent massaging frogs so that they drop their eggs. We’ll get thousands back, and we can watch development happen in real life.
It’s still a very hot debate in the field whether the surface of the ocean is acidic or basic. You would think we should know that, but we don’t.
HANNAH HORTON: I’m also a third-year studying molecular biology and I am in a lab that studies cell division. We all know that our bodies are made up of billions of cells that make up our tissues and our organs, and in order to replace old cells with new better-functioning cells and regenerate our tissues, our cells have to divide. One of the most important parts of one cell becoming two cells is accurately dividing up the chromosomes. Chromosomes are just those chunks of DNA that all of our genetic material is stored in, so in order for cell division to happen properly, chromosomes all have to replicate, make a copy of themselves. And then one copy will go to one side of the cell, the other copy will go to the other side of the cell, and then that cell pinches off and becomes two cells. That’s how cell division happens. We care about cell division because when it goes wrong it has pretty extreme consequences. When you have the wrong number of chromosomes in a cell, that gives rise to cancer, or genetic defects like Down syndrome, so understanding cell division is really important. We look specifically at egg cells because if those cells divide incorrectly, you get miscarriages, infertility, etc. That’s what I do.
TSW: Indeed. Garth?
GARTH FISHER: I study biofilms — basically, a large collection of bacteria that work collectively to defend itself against attack, and create more communities like it. Kind of like a city is built out of the interactions of a lot of people, biofilms emerge from having a whole bunch of very simple things that are working together in an environment. Specifically, I’m studying extracellular DNA, which is where these bacteria will take DNA, the basis of our genetic code, and use it as structural material rather than as an information repository. They use it as a kind of glue to stick to each other or stick to a surface. I feel like that was not very well explained.
TSW: That was so well explained, but you missed the most important thing. You are my boyfriend, correct?
GF: Yes.
TSW: OK, good. Now does any of this work relate to the coronavirus at all, even by the vaguest stretch of the imagination?
EL: We’ve been trying to find a way to relate.
TSW: Just to help out and make stuff? Or…
EL: Yeah, the machinery in our lab can’t be repurposed to make PPE (personal protective equipment), and honestly, nothing we are working on connects to the coronavirus.
TSW: Has the pandemic changed your work, or basically just put it on hold?
EL: Yes, and yes.
AM: We still have responsibilities like teaching and grading that go on no matter what because Northwestern is online. But we also have experiments that have been disrupted because we can’t go into the lab.
HH: I do a lot of wet lab work, physically doing experiments with reagents in the lab, and imaging, so we take pictures of the cells and the chromosomes and everything. I have thousands of images on my computer that I’ve taken over the course of the past few years, so this has kind of given me the opportunity to go back to all of that data and dig through everything and try to put it together into a story. So, in that sense, it’s a lot more data analysis than data acquisition. But in terms of the infrastructure of our lab, we’re still trying to make it as normal as possible. We’re still doing lab meetings, we’re still doing happy hours,we’re still having meetings, just online, and there’s just not nearly as much to talk about because much of our work has stopped.
EL: I’m preparing for my qualifying exam right now, but once I’m done with that, I’m sort of at a loss.
TSW: Here at The Seventh Wave we’ve been very interested in the idea of “actionable storytelling” for the past couple of months. Do you feel like you or your work tell the story of science in a meaningful way? And if so, to whom are you telling that story?
EL: I think there’s a couple of different levels on which you could be telling a story. At the very basic level, if you’re doing science, you’re always trying to tell a story to the group of people who are doing the exact work that you’re doing, the people whose work you’re building from, and the ones you need to convince.
TSW: So you’re preaching to the choir, in a deep sense.
EL: Exactly. It’s very much an echo chamber with a kind of language and jargon that only you and maybe a couple dozen other people really get.
GF: It’s not only preaching to the choir, it’s sparring with the choir. It’s all kinds of different interactions, they’re just all with the choir.
EL: You don’t have to go very far out of your field before it’s like people are speaking different languages. Different words and turns of phrases, conventions.
It’s not only preaching to the choir, it’s sparring with the choir.
TSW: I had a very similar experience with law. It took me a long time to realize that I already knew what a barrister did.
AM: One of the things I like about my field is that the broad questions people pose in it are really sexy. They draw in people from other fields like computer scientists, physicists, and philosophers who are also figuring out what life is composed of. I have a lot of opportunities to talk to people who are focused on the same idea but from a completely different lens.
HH: When you’re doing a Ph.D., you’re getting into the weeds on a very specific subject. I’m looking at one domain of one protein that’s a part of one protein complex that does a very specific thing in a very specific cell. You forget the big picture questions. When I’m explaining to my family what I do, I really zoom out because they don’t care about that stuff. They care about how your work could possibly ever affect them. In my case, we study cell division in egg cells, and when that gets fucked up, that’s how you get a miscarriage, or infertility, and the reason we care about that even more now than in the past, and the reason we advocate for this research in our grants is because some women just want to be moms, some women want to work, but some women want both. They want a career and they want to be a parent, even when those timelines are incompatible. Women are waiting longer and longer to have children in order to build their careers, and unfortunately they often find that they waited too long since infertility rises with age. So, when we are speaking to a wide audience we have to explain to them why our work is important to them.
GF: It’s an interesting challenge because a lot of what we do is incredibly esoteric. Different things are priorities at different times. It’s still very important to pay attention to telling both an accurate and easily understandable narrative no matter how esoteric your research is, you can’t give up on making it communicable to other people. Especially in times like these when attention is shifting rapidly and you have to create something that is understandable for a long time to come.
EL: It’s like the game where you tell a story but each person only says one sentence. Any one person’s contribution out of context makes no sense. It could be the most beautifully constructed sentence but it truly means nothing alone, only in the context of the broader story. Any one person’s research is only one sentence in the story, or perhaps more appropriately, a word in a sentence of the story. We’re crafting a beautiful, beautiful word that will take 5 to 7 years of our lives.
HH: For instance, people have been studying coronaviruses for decades, and now all of a sudden this little esoteric field has people bending over backwards to get into it.
TSW: How do you feel when you read the news in the morning and it says that the President is basically telling people to drink bleach and shit? I went to law school once-upon-a-time and when he does that my blood pressure crests and I see spots. All I can think is “how?”
AM: I don’t think my reaction is different from anyone else who is on the left half of the political spectrum. I don’t think about it from the point of view of a scientist, just the point of view of a person who doesn’t want other people drinking bleach.
EL: When he said the UV light thing, we were like “oh, shit.” Because we know what light can and can’t do.
GF: And wouldn’t that just give you colon cancer?
HH: All the cancers. People will bend over backwards to reinforce what they already believe, even if they lived through polio, the AIDS epidemic.
TSW: Do you think the public trusts scientists, in general? It’s like you guys made one mistake, you thought the earth was flat for, what, like three years in all of human history, and people keep bringing it up like you haven’t made a lot of really positive changes, you know? Is your story being heard? Are you able to make a difference? What do you think should be the role of science in an everyday person’s life?
EL: I think what it boils down to is it’s not a question of whether we should trust science, but whether we should trust critical thinking. You can’t always trust all science.
TSW: Yeah, like you learn about p-hacking in pretty much your first grad school class.
AM: There’s a big disconnect between how science is taught in schools and how it’s actually done. Science is changing every day and our understanding of it shifts, but when you think back on how you learned it, there was an old, printed textbook.
GF: Yes, most of what we’re doing, most of our knowledge is not relevant to this particular situation, but all of our knowledge is part of this giant collective that has allowed us, for instance, to understand coronavirus much faster than we did the 1918 flu, or whatever.
I think what it boils down to is it’s not a question of whether we should trust science, but whether we should trust critical thinking.
TSW: Could it also be that science is really a method, and we talk about it as if it’s a conclusion?
GF: Sure, in science, everything is a refinement of a previous refinement.
HH: And scientists are incredibly critical of each other. You don’t just publish a paper and everyone thinks it’s great. We’re not all just patting each other in the back and enabling some giant conspiracy to move forward.
AM: But I do think scientists are particularly bad at representing their work as fact rather than evidence.
GF: If you make something sound more certain than it is, that’s not good, but what we can do is be more decisive about shutting down bullshit. Like, there have been some really questionable decisions made around mask use and stuff. They wanted people to behave a certain way, and now it has caused problems down the line.
TSW: Who (or what) do you think is the main enemy of science right now?
HH: My gut instinct says corporate interests. There’s no incentive to fight against science unless your bottom line is contradictory to what science is saying.
GF: In the long run, keeping people ignorant is the enemy. You have to be able to interpret science, so any government that wants to shut down science will also be shutting down education.
AM: When people invest in something, they usually want hard, economic returns in a very short timeframe, and that timescale is much shorter than that of gaining understanding in science as it evolves.
TSW: What do you think should be the role of scientists during grad school and into their careers as it relates to the public at large? Is it fine for us to keep eating snacks and trodding along in this sham of civilization? I guess what I’m asking is, do scientists dream about revolution?
AM: Scientists span the spectrum like everyone else.
TSW: Do you consider yourself an activist?
AM: I would like to be.
EL: Aspirationally.
TSW: Do you feel like you have an obligation to your fellow citizen as far as convincing them of relevant scientific facts?
GF: I don’t think you have an obligation to convince people of anything, as much as lay out the information in a way that works for them. I think that’s important. Laying out the relevant information in a clear way that people can understand.
AM: Our best bet is focusing on the culture of science that we’re in. Everyone wants to be the first person to discover something, so they will publish without a thought to the way it may be interpreted by people or picked up by news outlets.
GF: They’ll pick up a scientific article about a study on mice and extrapolate it to humans or whatever, and I don’t think scientists have control over that at all.
HH: Science writing and science communication are fields unto themselves.
TSW: Are there many, or any, people studying the life sciences that can pull off JFK’s winsome grin or the jaunty bob of an Angela Merkel? Or, at the end of the day, does being really smart inherently make you really unlikeable, at least to those determined to be successful in a capitalist society? At this point I feel like we know a lot of right answers as far as how to make the best of the human condition, but we can’t bring ourselves to live in accord with the facts when we can ignore them and make money.
HH: I think Anthony Fauci is a perfect example of that.
TSW: Zaddy Fauci, go on.
HH: It’s a rare case because he’s actually qualified to be in the position that he holds. His entire job is just giving us bad news, and whether someone loves or hates him is pretty predictable based on their political track record. So regardless of how charismatic or relatable you are, if you’re telling people the truth, something they don’t want to hear, well then…
TSW: Everyone’s a doctor all of a sudden, so what do you guys think is the best way to stay safe right now, other than staying in our apartment and offering to make each other sandwiches? If you could tell the American public one thing (don’t worry, they aren’t reading this), what would you say?
GF: There isn’t consensus on the finer points of doing things, but just stay the fuck inside. Wear masks, wear gloves.
HH: Listen to the CDC. Everybody’s heard what they’re supposed to be doing by now.
EL: Check your ego.
Avi-Yona Israel is a writer living in Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared in The Seventh Wave, The Emerson Review, Rigorous, Virga Magazine, Capulet Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, and The Esthetic Apostle, among others. She is the current Director of Advocacy for the Seventh Wave.
